- State approaches to contact tracing: This report from the National Academy for State Health Policy, updated on December 2, explores how every U.S. state is approaching contact tracing for COVID-19 cases. The report includes state partnerships with research institutions, adjustments for case surges, workforce sizes and training, digital contact tracing apps, and more. (H/t Al Tompkins’ COVID-19 newsletter.)
- KFF COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor (December update): The newest polling report from the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Vaccine Monitor project is out this week, detailing public opinion on vaccinations, including booster shots, mandates, and more. Two notable findings: four in ten Republican adults are unvaccinated, and Republicans are less likely to report receiving a booster dose than Democrats.
Tag: Featured sources
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Sources and updates, December 5
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Sources and updates, November 28
- State vaccination data: This weekend, I updated my annotations on state and national vaccination data sources in the U.S. A few more states are now reporting information on booster shots, and several states have adjusted their vaccine coverage metrics to reflect vaccine eligibility for children in the 5 to 11 age group. Notably, since my last update, Alaska, D.C., Utah, and Vermont’s health agencies have all started reporting some demographic information regarding booster shot recipients in their states.
- Moral injury among healthcare workers during COVID-19: There have been a lot of headlines recently about burnout among healthcare workers. This study, based on a survey of 1,300 healthcare workers and published this week in JAMA Network Open, provides some statistics to underlie the trend. See the supplemental materials for sample quotations from the survey respondents, demonstrating their feelings of fatigue, isolation, and betrayal.
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Sources and updates, November 21
- CDC adds data on 5-11 vaccinations: The main vaccinations page on the CDC’s COVID-19 dashboard now includes vaccination rates for all U.S. residents ages 5 and older, in addition to all the previous categories (12 and older, 18 and older, 65 and older). These rates are available by dose and by state. Plus, the CDC has added an age 5-11 category to its demographic vaccination trends page. Notably, age 5-11 data haven’t been added to the Community Profile Reports yet, but I expect this will happen in the next couple of weeks.
- Breakthrough case reporting by state: 36 states are reporting breakthrough COVID-19 cases, 34 are reporting breakthrough hospitalizations, and 37 are reporting breakthrough deaths, according to a report from former COVID Tracking Project researchers and the Rockefeller Foundation. The report also discusses the challenges of tracking breakthrough cases and the importance of linking clinical and demographic data to these cases.
- Long COVID resources from ApresJ20: ApresJ20, a Long COVID association based in France, has compiled this extensive document of over 1,000 scientific papers about the condition. Topics include defining Long COVID, characterizing symptoms, managing patient care, genetic associations, and more. For each paper, the document includes its title, authors, publish date, peer review status, and summary.
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Sources and updates, November 14
- Directory of Local Health Departments: The National Association of County and City Health Officials maintains this database of all local public health departments in the U.S. You can navigate to health department lists for specific states by clicking on the map, or explore a 180-page PDF that includes the name, website link, and contact information (in some cases) for every single department.
- Media and Misinformation update from the KFF Vaccine Monitor: The Kaiser Family Foundation typically updates its COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor project with reports once a month. This week, however, the Vaccine Monitor team released an additional report focusing on American adults’ experiences with misinformation. One key finding: about 78% of those surveyed “believe or are unsure about at least one common falsehood” about COVID-19 or the vaccines.
- More data on vaccination for kids 5-11 is coming: About 900,000 children in the recently-eligible 5 to 11 age group were vaccinated in the first week since the CDC authorized shots for these kids, the White House announced on Wednesday. At the time, this estimate was higher than official numbers on the CDC’s dashboard due to data lags; but the agency is planning to publish more data on this age group by the end next week, according to Bloomberg editor Drew Armstrong.
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Featured sources, November 7
- School Learning Modalities (HHS): Is that… could it be… comprehensive K-12 school COVID-19 data from the federal government?! Indeed: after over a year of calling out the government’s lack of data on this crucial topic, I was delighted to see the Department of Health and Human Services add a new dashboard to its COVID-19 data hub this week. The dashboard, produced in a collaboration between the CDC and the Department of Education, provides weekly updates on the learning status of school districts: in-person, hybrid, or remote. As of November 6, the dashboard included data for about 89% of students in 62% of districts. Next up, can we get some school case data?
- When To Test (NIH): Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) supported production of an online tool aimed at helping schools, businesses, and other organizations develop routine COVID-19 testing programs. The tool, called When To Test, was updated this week with a new calculator aimed at individuals. Input some COVID-19 information (such as your location, vaccination status, and daily contacts), and the tool will help you determine whether to get tested. It could be useful for planning holiday gatherings!
- COVID-19 Diagnostics Commons (ASU): Here’s another testing source, from Arizona State University. ASU researchers built a database of over 2,500 COVID-19 testing technologies that are available or going through the regulatory approval process around the world. You can search through the tests by regulatory status, diagnostic target, accuracy levels, and more.
- Directory of federal government prime contractors: All businesses that contract with the federal government have until January 4, 2022 to ensure that all of their employees are vaccinated against COVID-19. This directory, from the U.S. Small Business Association, provides a comprehensive list of those contractors. You can see business names, what they do for the government, and more. (h/t Al Tompkins’ Covering COVID-19 newsletter.)
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Sources and updates, October 31
A lot of COVID-19 data sources caught my eye this week!
- More booster data from the CDC: This week, the CDC added both booster shot trends by day and booster shots by primary series type to its COVID Data Tracker. For booster shot trends, click “People Receiving a Booster Dose” on the Trends page, and for primary series data, scroll down to “Covid-19 Booster Dose Type by Primary Series Type” on the Vaccination Totals page. So far, it looks like a lot of Johnson & Johnson recipients are opting for mRNA boosters.
- KFF’s latest Vaccine Monitor update: The Kaiser Family Foundation has released the latest edition of its monthly vaccine poll, the COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor. This month’s edition focuses on vaccinations for children ages 5 to 11, in line with the recent discussions around shots for this age group, but it also includes other polling on general vaccination demographics, boosters, mandates, and more.
- Under-testing in U.S. prisons and jails: A new report from the UCLA Law COVID Behind Bars Data Project explores how insufficient COVID-19 testing of incarcerated people in the U.S. contributes to skewed case rates. Even in the states that have tested their incarcerated populations the most, this report shows, that testing is still far less frequent than testing for other congregate living facilities, like nursing homes.
- Impact of School Opening on SARS-CoV-2 Transmission: A group of scientists (including school data expert Emily Oster) recently published a new paper in Nature examining how school reopening models—remote, hybrid, or in-person—contribute to community transmission. In most parts of the country, reopening model did not have a significant impact on transmission, they found; the South was an exception. The authors shared the data underlying their paper, with some information from Burbio and the CDC removed due to requirements from those organizations.
- Reporting recipe for breakthrough case data: Dillon Bergin, my colleague at the Documenting COVID-19 project, wrote this reporting recipe, which guides local newsrooms through acquiring data on and covering breakthrough cases in their areas. The recipe accompanies a recent story that Dillon wrote, in collaboration with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, on breakthrough cases by occupation in Las Vegas. (Unsurprisingly, healthcare workers and casino workers were likely to have breakthrough cases, the Las Vegas data show.)
- Polling on small businesses and vaccine mandates: Here’s another vaccine survey released this week, this one from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The agency asked small businesses about their positions on vaccine mandates, as well as hiring challenges and other issues. 64% of small business owners support “businesses in their area requiring vaccines for their employees,” the survey found.
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Featured sources, October 24
- More booster shot data from the CDC: The CDC has added more data on additional vaccine doses to its COVID-19 dashboard. Specifically, we can now analyze booster shots by state: raw numbers, share of the fully vaccinated population with a booster, and limited age data (18+, 50+, 65+). If anyone from the CDC is reading this: I would love to see some race/ethnicity data next!
- Racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 hospitalization: A new CDC study published this week in JAMA Open Network presents analysis of data from COVID-NET, the national agency’s surveillance system for COVID-19 hospitalizations. The study, like other research on this topic, found that non-white Americans were far more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 or die from the disease in the first year of the pandemic than their white neighbors. Supplemental tables for the study include breakdowns of COVID-19 hospitalizations by different demographic groups, by underlying medical conditions, and over time.
- The COVID States Project: In this polling project, researchers surveyed people in all 50 U.S. states to ask whether they approve of the president and of their governors. The survey is jointly run by researchers at Harvard, Northeastern, Northwestern, and Rutgers Universities. This latest report, released in October, includes executive approval data stratified by political party and vaccination status.
- COVID-19, compared to other leading causes of death: COVID-19 was the number two cause of death in the U.S. in September 2021—after heart disease—according to this report from the Peterson Center on Healthcare and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The report compares COVID-19 to other top causes of death in the country, including data over time and by age group.
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Sources and updates, October 17
- COVID-19 cases, deaths, hospitalizations by vaccination status: The latest addition to the CDC’s COVID-19 dashboard, this week, is a set of two pages that break out case, death, and hospitalization rates by vaccination status. The page with case and death rates draws on CDC monitoring programs, and may not be entirely representative of data for the entire U.S. The page with hospitalization rates draws on COVID-NET, a network of over 250 hospitals in 14 states.
- Hospitalization data will shift back to the CDC: Bloomberg reported this week that the Biden administration will bring the HHS Protect system, which tracks hospitalization data, under the auspices of the CDC. Hospitalization data moved from CDC responsibility to HHS responsibility in summer 2020—a move covered extensively by the COVID-19 Data Dispatch. At the time, this change drew criticism, though the HHS Protect system developed into a highly reliable data source. It is unclear how a move back to the CDC may impact hospitalization tracking.
- Mask Diplomacy in Latin America During the COVID-19 Pandemic: This dataset, compiled by political scientists Diego Telias and Francisco Urdinez, includes over 500 donations of COVID-19 supplies—face masks, respirators, tests, and more. The data underlie a preprint posted online in August 2020 discussing China’s diplomacy in Latin America and the Caribbean. (h/t Data Is Plural.)
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Featured sources, October 10
- COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness (CDC): The CDC has added a new page to its COVID Data Tracker, focused on visualizing how well the vaccines work. This page includes data from several ongoing studies used by the CDC to monitor vaccine effectiveness: one tracks COVID-19 infection in long-term care facility residents, another tracks hospitalization in veterans, and so on. “This is not a comprehensive representation of all data sets, but the populations being followed are large and well described (if limited),” said science writer Katherine Wu, sharing the new page on Twitter.
- COVID-19-Associated Orphanhood in the U.S.: Over 140,000 American children lost a parent or a caregiver during the pandemic, according to a new study from the CDC, Imperial College London, and other collaborators. This study follows another study from Imperial College London that took a global focus (which I featured in the July 25 issue); this new paper includes data broken out by state and by race and ethnicity. Black children were more than twice as likely to lose a parent or caregiver as white children, and Native American children were more than four times as likely.
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Featured sources, October 3
- State vaccination reporting: Yesterday, I updated the COVID-19 Data Dispatch page detailing how every state is tracking vaccination. Notably, 15 states now include counts of third doses (or “additional doses,” or “booster shots”) in their vaccine dashboards and reports. A couple of those states (Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey) are even reporting demographic breakdowns of the residents that have received third doses. I expect that more states will add these metrics to their vaccine reports in the coming weeks.
- COVID-19 cases and deaths, urban vs. rural counties: A new report from the RUPRI Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis at the University of Iowa demonstrates the disproportionate impact that COVID-19 is now having on rural communities. The rate of COVID-19 deaths in rural areas is now twice what it is in urban areas. For context about and data visualizations sourcing this report, see this KHN article by Lauren Weber.
- School District Operational Status: Research organization MCH Strategic Data has compiled detailed data on the operational status of school districts across the country—fully in-person, fully remote, or hybrid. The dashboard also includes information on school mask policies and summary data by state. (H/t Your Local Epidemiologist.)
- State-level analysis of charter school trends: The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools analyzed changes to school enrollment in every state during the 2020-2021 school year, focusing on drops in district public school enrollment and rises in charter school enrollment. Oklahoma had the highest charter school gain, with a whopping 78% enrollment increase.
COVID-19 Data Dispatch 